Some faction of the Kurds have revealed their own strategic goal by dissassociating themselves from it. That is, some diaspora groups are protesting in the United States that Turkey wants to invade Kurdistan for Kirkuk. It doesn’t have anything to do with PKK depredations on their soil, of course–or the incipient threat of destabilization throughout Iraq, spreading north, and compromising Turkey’s security in general. Oh, no, it’s that oil again.

Let’s go for that conspiracy scenario, just long enough to kill it For Ever:
1. Turkey, with, uh, WAY MORE military capability than the U.S., has decided that they could conduct war with Iraq in a far more efficient fashion than the U.S. ever could.

Nah. The paranoids may have a point with that efficiency thing: on the other hand, seeing that the U.S. actually has the capability, and can’t guarantee security, it seems past ridiculous to think that Turkey would go flying, marching, and tanking on in to the same revenue-threatening and life-threatening black hole of Iraq in order to take on a town that is primed for resentment and strife.

2. One protester stated that Turkey is not afraid of the PKK, but rather afraid of a Kurdish state. And of course this makes, yes, perfect sense.

Nope: The PKK wants to bomb Turkish towns and resorts, killing innocent people and being sneaky about it, disrupt the economy and create conflict and strife. The Kurdish state wants to ship oil through Turkey and get on with making money. Uh, I know Turkey is completely unfavorable to the idea of generating income, preferring instead to foment domestic instability and gleefully hailing each incident of lost infrastructure. It’s just this attitude that makes Turkey a force for good in the international system–

Personally, I believe that Kurdish-Americans would go a lot further by deprecating the PKK and trying to help Turkey provide goods and services for its own ethnic Kurdish residents. Oh, and building partnerships to keep those pipelines in northern Iraq in good order: for the good of Iraq, Kurdistan, and Turkey–heck, the world at large. Hope you’ll think about it–and then do something constructive.

Kirkuk is a mess, but not Turkey’s mess:
Consider the machinations, forced importations and deportations that have been occurring in Kirkuk: the blame doesn’t rest with Turkey: a history of forced Kurdish deportations from the Kirkuk area has been rectified with new human rights violations–forced non-Kurdish deportations from Kirkuk.

The stratagems may be based upon history, but history has not taught compassion. Right now, the paranoia of the non-Kurdish Kirkuk residents is the justifiable paranoia: because they’ve been had. It’s a bad business, and Turkey’s got nothing to do with it.

There was Way too Much to editorialize concerning Iraq this week, so it gets its own special edition in the Weekly Rambling Intelligence feature . . .

Announcements:
One: Iraqi Slogger has gone membership only, USD 60 per month as of today. It’s a great site, aggregating all the Iraq news, and this is your last week to link to it from Ramblin’ Gal (so you can enroll). Two: for those of you very interested in Iraq affairs, this week Joshua Foust at the Conjecturer gave the blow-by-blow daily readout, which he does extremely well. This post will get you started.

Congress gets a Clue, or Three:
This is so funny/not: finally the Congressional members on FFMs in Iraq realized they were living in a fantasy when they discovered the cheat sheet each person in the Green Zone had on them about their Iraq votes. It’s very sad when our best personnel in the most dangerous place have to act like they work for Dear Leader. And it seems to suggest that partisanship, and not military knowledge, continues to run this effort right into the ground.

Worse, this information was available in Harper’s years ago, en embryo, with the wallet sized card the soldiers carry around to remind them how to treat the press. It’s fatuity that has kept this realization from Congress for so long. Maybe it will also come to mind that their gratuitous FFMs could be diverting staff from real work–but nah.

For a different delegation, reality did rear its head: or its surface-to-air missile: evasive maneuvers as the last delegation left. They were actually being shot at, which is such a bummer for the spinner’s orchestration. Maybe they can call it the parting strains of the 1812 2007 Overture. Or maybe that will make these lawmakers feel more falsely akin to the troops who put up with this as a matter of course.

The U.S. General Accounting Office reports that only three of the eighteen benchmarks are being met, not eight out of eighteen (again an almost useless way to measure the benchmarks), which has electrified Congress yet again– But here’s a surprise: Bush fights back.

Matt Taibbi on the cost-plus contract at Rolling Stone: cronyism created the police academy rendered unusable by poor plumbing, a stock-exchange started by a 24 year old Republican American neophyte–and more. It reeks. And if you don’t trust Rolling Stone, you can read GAO Report No. 07-711, DOD cannot ensure that US-Funded Equipment Has Reached Iraqi Security Forces, (pdf, 25 pages), or the one-page Highlights.

The U.S. is not processing enough applications for Iraq refugees who have assisted the U.S. and are most at risk if things get worse: this goes double for those who have worked with contractors and are not acknowledged as being at risk.

I see little political rapprochement-this Iraq analyst sees that political decisions are not so much the problem as that politics has not translated to economic policies, and that neither politics nor economics has been taken to the people. One case in point: the relatively more-stable Kurdish areas are having difficulty providing utilities to its citizens, because the central Government has not built any power infrastructure in the region. Therefore, the KRG has made its own arrangements with Qatar. Yet another reason why the center cannot hold.

The good news is that General Petraeus solicits independent thinking and analysis from his junior officers. One report he received was leaked to the Washington Post, which says that Iraq’s central government is a participant in Civil War. All are denying it, because it will serve no purpose in the field, but many are acknowledging its truth in private.

Violence in Karbala, when Shia religious observation was rendered deadly between Sunni/Shia and then became inter-Shia factional fighting between Sadrists and SIIC elements. On Tuesday, Mr. al-Sadr declares a ceasefire for six months, which, after SIIC headquarters in Najaf, Kufa, Baghdad and Iskandaria are bombed, has actually lasted more than six hours. However, the Sadrists insist they will not take it well if their members are detained, questioned, or otherwise interfered with. Huh.

Following al-Sadr’s lead, the Iraqi government calls for a universal cease-fire: not the other way around . . . not too much good news this week.

About two weeks until the September Benchmark Report. . . I’ll probably do this again next week. There’s plenty more news where all this came from; this post could be twice as long . . .

Africa:
♦ I don’t usually cover Africa in the RI, but this article about Darfur cannot be passed by. As usual, Dan Graeber hits the essentials in this brutal, piteous world.

Asia-Pacific:
♦ The China-U.S. trade quality war Escalates again: now it is U.S. soybeans, with considerable dirt, pesticide, and weeds. The latter conditions would allow for perhaps large changes in Chinese biomes–sort of like the kudzu vine that took over the South. Also U.S. oil-seed. Best-case scenario? All of this ends up increasing quality in the long term. In the short term: heck, no. In the meantime, the toy-and-dog-biscuit inspections in the U.S. proceed apace.
♦ The increasing importance of relations between India and Japan. India’s maritime might, now and in the future.
♦ Australia’s military defense strategies and the debate over economic v. military security at The Strategist.
♦ In India’s Hyderabad, 34 people die because of bombing.

Latin America:
♦ Hurricane Dean in Mexico: at least 26 have died from the storm.
♦ Peru’s earthquake: at least 510 are dead, with more casualties being found. Quisiera expresar mis condolencias al gente de las dos paises.
♦ The FEALAC symposium met this week this week in Brasilia, as reported by Boz. According to AFP, the Forum for East Asian-Latin American Cooperation includes: Australia, Brunei, Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, New Zealand, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam, and from Latin America: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Chile, Ecuador, El Salvador, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela.
♦ Venezuela–now cutting bus fares for the indigent in London. Now buying 98 Ilyushin aircraft from Russia, for cargo or passengers . . . or, not.
♦ According to an extract provided from this post, Castro is in no way dead. So there you are.
♦ Pollution from blue jeans in Mexico.

◊ Iraq / U.S. Politics: I tried to cover this in the op-ed war posts that I wrote yesterday. Here is one post on Mr. Allawi, and here is one on a must-read editorial from staff officer veterans of Iraq.

Energy:
♦ Storm damage notwithstanding, Pemex is back in business, bringing oil to the U.S.
♦ Storm damages notwithstanding, Energy Prices a little more stable overall. As of August 23rd: Brent crude, USD 69.58; West Texas intermediate, USD 69.68.
♦ Rounding out the North American picture on U.S. energy imports, The Oil Drum has started a series on oil sands extraction, which does not look attractive.

Overall, the message this week to me is two-fold: we need to plan international endeavours so carefully, in terms of both physical and energy security.

The op-ed coup d’etat between Mr. Maliki and Mr. Allawi is only part of the juxtapositioning over the September Benchmark report and the non-progress it will be required to present:

Op-ed war of words no. 2: Quality and quantity
On July 30, Kenneth Pollack and Michael O’Hanlon wrote an op-ed for the New York Times that Iraq was “A War We just might Win“, something that every Republican Presidential candidate has found interesting for the wrong reasons: that a so-called liberal paper would hold an editorial favorable to Mr. Bush’s goals.

Immediately afterward, a long-time Iraq correspondent, Jonathan Finer, wrote in the Washington Post that these two, and indeed all, Green Zone Investigators (which includes Congresspersons, pundits, national security advisors, Presidential candidates, etc) never get out to see anything and their epiphanies are at best, suspect. Like so many, Mr. Finer focussed on location, (ie, the Green Zone) but he also (at last) included the element of time, calling these “snapshot tours”. No fact-finding mission of a week will tell you what is going on in Iraq, whether surrounded by BlackHawk helicopters and handlers or not.

I’m sure of four things: a. that trips to Iraq serve as legitimizers to all who go, even for that three-day weekend. b. that the feeling of fear that all of these day-trippers have as they go back and forth from the Green Zone feels real enough to introduce a kind of reality to the trip. c. that people such as Mr. O’Hanlon and Mr. Pollack get information that we don’t get, study Iraq often and with numbers. and d. I’ve also heard with my own ears Mr. Pollack talk publicly about this war as a debacle. The editorial they cited was hedged: failure was still exceedingly possible, and despite the title of the op-ed, it did not really sound like a “win”. And despite Mr. Finer’s characterization, it sounds as if the two Brookings trippers went past the Green Zone, to Mosul, Tal Afar, Ramadi, and the “Ghazni neighborhood of Baghdad.” Of course, they did this in eight days, and I doubt even the complexity of the Ghazni neighborhood could be adequately assessed in that time. But this is their view:

Here is the most important thing Americans need to understand: We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms. As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq, we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily “victory” but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with.

After the furnace-like heat, the first thing you notice when you land in Baghdad is the morale of our troops. In previous trips to Iraq we often found American troops angry and frustrated — many sensed they had the wrong strategy, were using the wrong tactics and were risking their lives in pursuit of an approach that could not work.

Today, morale is high.

I have a little sympathy for Mr. Hanlon and Mr. Pollack because it’s just horribly risky to write a positive-sounding op-ed, especially when there’s so much data to the contrary. I’ve done it myself, and if you’re not a pessimist you look like a fool. But unfortunately, this week the NYT ran an editorial from non-GZ Trippers, i.e., staff officers that have been hip-deep in Iraqi dust and sweat and blood for 15 months with the 82nd Airborne.

Being there, and being there:

As responsible infantrymen and noncommissioned officers with the 82nd Airborne Division soon heading back home, we are skeptical of recent press coverage portraying the conflict as increasingly manageable and feel it has neglected the mounting civil, political and social unrest we see every day. (Obviously, these are our personal views and should not be seen as official within our chain of command.)

One of these NCO’s, SSgt. Murphy, currently has a head wound, and this underscores that sympathy ultimately should not go to the optimistic op-ed writer but to the practitioner. And these practitioners slam the ivory-tower, marble-halled view:

The claim that we are increasingly in control of the battlefields in Iraq is an assessment arrived at through a flawed, American-centered framework. Yes, we are militarily superior, but our successes are offset by failures elsewhere. What soldiers call the “battle space” remains the same, with changes only at the margins. It is crowded with actors who do not fit neatly into boxes: Sunni extremists, Al Qaeda terrorists, Shiite militiamen, criminals and armed tribes. This situation is made more complex by the questionable loyalties and Janus-faced role of the Iraqi police and Iraqi Army, which have been trained and armed at United States taxpayers’ expense.

A few nights ago, for example, we witnessed the death of one American soldier and the critical wounding of two others when a lethal armor-piercing explosive was detonated between an Iraqi Army checkpoint and a police one. Local Iraqis readily testified to American investigators that Iraqi police and Army officers escorted the triggermen and helped plant the bomb. These civilians highlighted their own predicament: had they informed the Americans of the bomb before the incident, the Iraqi Army, the police or the local Shiite militia would have killed their families.

As many grunts will tell you, this is a near-routine event. Reports that a majority of Iraqi Army commanders are now reliable partners can be considered only misleading rhetoric. The truth is that battalion commanders, even if well meaning, have little to no influence over the thousands of obstinate men under them, in an incoherent chain of command, who are really loyal only to their militias.

Thus, according to this last op-ed, the splintering in politics is well-represented with continued splinters in security.

More, and more:
Yesterday, John Warner R-Va, came back from a four-day trip to Iraq and said it’s time to start withdrawing troops, about 5,000 this year, in the hopes of prodding Iraq’s politicians to get going.

War of Wards: Mr. Allawi v. Mr. al-Maliki
Who has Iraq in charge, and who wants to be there? The last hope of reaching political consensus within Iraq’s political factions came and went two weeks ago, when the Sunni boycotted the legislative special session all the way to recess. That has ended the most important benchmark indicators for Bush in his upcoming fight with Congress–not to mention the fact that it’s not good for Iraq to have a non-functional, over-factionalized government. Also, the two sets of Kurdish politicians cannot decide between Iraq and Kurdistan as national entities. And more.

Then there are more splits. Today, Ayad Allawi’s INP party, which holds 25 of 275 seats and 5 ministerial positions, announced it would be leaving al-Maliki’s government. On April 18, Allawi wrote an editorial in the WashingtonPost that stated, among other things, that:

Responsibility for the current mess in Iraq rests primarily with the Iraqi government, not with the United States. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has failed to take advantage of the Iraqi people’s desire for peaceful and productive lives and of the enormous commitment and sacrifices made by the United States and other nations.

On August 20th, Iraqslogger.com broke the story that Allawi has retained a Bush-insider’s lobbying firm, BRG, to represent Allawi’s interests and put down al-Maliki’s pretensions to office within the White House, Congress, and staffers in both places. It only costs USD 300,000. for six months, part of which was a mail-out of this made-for-U.S.-egos editorial. While certainly Iraq’s politicians have a long way to go, one needs only look at the poor politics, poor planning, and massive waste on this end to realize that Mr. Allawi has concocted the perfect set of excuses for the U.S. administration: some people haven’t gotten with the plan. The funadamental problem with this view is that there was no plan.

According to the same IraqSlogger article, BRG also represents the Kurdistan Regional Government in Washington.

The Allawi Memos seem to have been having an effect. Mr. Bush II distanced himself from Mr. al-Maliki just this week, prompting an angry response from the Iraqi Prime Minister. Bush then tried to retrieve some lost ground at a speech at the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) convention the next day.

However, there are other rifts besides those manufactured by BRG. Last November, Mr. al-Maliki snubbed Mr. Bush II over leadership issues. In late July, the London Telegraph published an account of General Petraeus’ rocky relationship to Mr. al-Maliki, which apparently includes shouting matches with Ambassador Crocker looking on. At the same time, an article in the NYT detailed the close coordination between the two leaders via teleconferencing and other means, which have led to limited results.

This is the more recent news than part 2, on the benefits/costs of the Surge as noted in the op-ed wars. However, both are significant. This particular war of words shows that political solutions are far away in Iraq, and also in the U.S. when discussing Iraq. And that lobbying here interferes there.

Sorry I scamped out on you last week. I missed you all, and I hope to do bettah.

Asia-Pacific:
♦ China suffers another product recall, and the WSJ says it is at least partly a design flaw that has nothing to do with China. I have already blogged that it is partly a management failure that has nothing to do with China. But now it’s also baby bibs.
♦ Highly contagious swine virus in China, international community on alert.
♦ One thing I missed last week and is beautiful for covering a region we don’t know well: The Strategist keeps on with some in-depth study of Melanesia, this time resource wars.
♦ Kevin Rudd on Australia’s campaign trail. I heard Mr. Rudd speak at Brookings Institution this past April and I wish him well.
♦ The ADB again announces inroads against extreme poverty in Asia, but a widening income gap.
♦ Hizb-ut-Tahrir conference in Jakarta is well-attended.
♦ A large amount of my attention this week has been the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in Bishkek and military games in Xinjiang & Chelyabinsk. Check out the FPA Central Asia blog for the latest. This is all so important, whether you are a Central-Asia watcher or not. To wit, next entry:

Middle East:
♦ Two respected foreign policy professors expand a controversial article into a soon-to-be controversial book about U.S.-Israeli relations. This NYT article has links to the original piece and some background. Whatever you might think of their opinion, one has to admire the courage of their convictions. I’m glad that they have brought this to examination: everything important deserves scrutiny.
♦ FPA War Crimes reports on the verdict in the Padilla detention/terrorism case. For more background, you can stay with that blog, because Daniel’s been covering it thoroughly. The Conjecturer also analyzes it, by taking a look at the limits and mandates of the DIA in re: Padilla.

Afghanistan: [ edited down from FPA Central Asia ]
♦ Now that Britain is pulling out of Iraq, they plan to focus more on Afghanistan.
♦ An AP article that titularly is about Barack Obama is actually a report on civilian deaths in Afghanistan. Though the U.S. or NATO does not keep figures on civilian deaths (either a mistruth or a mistake) AP does: 231 civilians were killed by militants; 286 by troops; and 20 in crossfire, unattributable to either party.
♦ On August 15th, a New offensive started against the Taliban in Tora Bora.
♦ Two S. Korean hostages released. That means there’s 19 left.
♦ New Counternarcotics strategies sound the same as old counternarcotics strategies. This is a must-read article by Mr. Weitz over at World Politics Review, complete with maps, and, new UNODC figures estimating another rise in opium production, this time by 15%.
♦ U.S. would certainly take out al-Q targets in Pakistan, but not in a way that would make Pakistan angry. But Pakistan seems to be already upset at the prospect: a highly literate editorial at Pakistan Daily.
♦ Australia’s work in Uruzgan, at My State Failure blog.

Iran:
♦ Is it semantically correct? I don’t know, but the Quds Force is going to be designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. of A.
♦ Mr. Ahmadinejad in Turkmenistan and Bishkek for SCO meetings.

Iraq:
♦ Targeting the Yazidi sect in Nineveh near Mosul. Four hundred are dead. Do we call this genocide? As Iraq increasingly settles in sectarian patterns, every bombing will be a kind of genocide or sect-killing; yet Yazidis have been a deliberate target since at least April. al-Q is blamed immediately, but the reasons haven’t been divulged.
♦ Abu Aardvark’s Marc Lynch reports that the last-ditch political rapprochement for September’s Benchmark Report and ultimately for Iraq’s political viability is dead in the dirt. h/t: FP Passport. RFE/RL has a slightly different take, citing Mr. Talibani: “Sunni are welcome to join our coalition.” It ends up the same, however: Sunni have not joined the coalition. In my newsletter this month, I’ve discussed the way Sunni concerns have been sidelined. . . in the oil law. . .
♦ Iraq-Iran pipeline deal signed.
♦ Iraq Slogger special report on the Bridges of Baghdad.

U.S. Politics:
♦ Mr. Rove waltzes on out of the White House, ostensibly to avoid Congressional investigation. No doubt he will write a book that exculpates him from all wrong decisions, minimizes his impact on poor outcomes, and maximizes his genius in those extraordinary outcomes, and dishes against all those who tried to block his progress. uh, sure. . . Can’t wait. They store a lot of extra, non-partisan, all-purpose whitewash in the White House, and I’m sure he took a bucket of it with him.
♦ Candidate Romney says the way his sons support U.S. efforts in Iraq is by campaigning for Dad. Oh, Bleah. Vanity to the max.
♦ U.S. military suicides are running very high. Twenty-eight soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan this year. Such deaths denote despair, and that despair radiates outward into the military community: their close associates, who also must deal. ♦ Related to my many comments on the U.S. Farm Bill: CARE International is finding USDA aid too much trouble, too expensive, and way counterproductive in meeting famine in poverty-stricken countries.

This is from Anthony Swofford’s memoir, Jarhead, first published in 2003 by Scribners. Like many accounts of war, it details the problems of sleep disturbance, and how sleeping pills and extra physical activity don’t have the same effect on sleeplessness as they would away from a battle zone.

Once the air campaign begins, I never sleep through the night. Three hours is the longest stretch of uninterrupted sleep I experience, and this occurs during a bogus patrol when Johnny says, “Let’s get some sleep,” and we take off our helmets and flaks and sleep in wet sand. If a Scud altert doesn’t interrupt our sleep, someone screaming from a nightmare or wide-awake anger and fear will awaken the entire hootch. Doc John Duncan passes out sleeping pills to those who want them, but I’m afraid of sleeping through a valid alert, and anyway, the guys who take the pills wake up just like those who don’t. The synthetic chemical for drowsiness is not as strong as the naturally occurring chemical called fear. (pp. 185-186)

Mr. Swofford describes young people doing the best they know how with the situation they are given:

Another night, after we return to the hootch from a Scud alert, Dettmann starts weeping and won’t stop. We tell him to stop, but he won’t or can’t. Combs, near the breaking point himself, takes [him] outside and thrashes him for a good hour, but throughout the exhausting cycle of bends-and-thrusts and push-ups and bear crawls, he continues to cry. Goerke, a bit of a humanist, joins Dettmann outside and insists that Combs thrash him as well, because even though Goerke isn’t crying, he wants to cry, and isn’t it the same thing? he asks. (p. 186).

So, same place, different decade: longer tours, a more differentiated battle environment. Yet military personnel in the U.S. are being asked to serve longer tours with less rest and relaxation. And there is no really good program for PTSD treatment at the VA, nor is the existing program ramped up to meet a new demand.